Hall of Fame extends long overdue welcome to Flyers' Shero

Coach Fred Shero, center, talks with captain Bobby Clarke, left, and goalie Bernie Parent, right, on the first day of practice in 1975. Shero will join Clarke and Parent in the Hockey Hall of Fame Monday. (AP file photo/Bill Ingraham)

Flyers coach Fred Shero listens to a question during his farewell press conference in Philadelphia in 1978. Shero left the Flyers to coach the New York Rangers. (AP file photo/Bill Ingraham)

“I never thought Freddy was shy. He was eccentric. He would stay out of the limelight as much as he could.”

— Bob Clarke on Fred Shero

By ROB PARENT

rparent@delcotimes.com

PHILADELPHIA — The obvious, unavoidable question, of course, is what took them so long?

It’s been asked for years, and in its fashion the Hockey Hall of Fame’s Induct-A-Friend committee maintained silence as usual.

They would also walk away from what was everyone’s first assumption: That candidate Frederick Alexander Shero would be bypassed because he was the coach who raised the ugly bar in the NHL in the early 1970s. That is an assumption that carries over to the present day. It is a question that will always go unanswered, because, finally, it’s one that no longer carries any weight.

Not everybody can be justifiably voted into that Toronto place of fan worship, and besides, it’s a museum. It shouldn’t be an indictment on anyone who isn’t in there. But when it was announced in July that Freddy “The Fog” Shero would be joining the 2014 induction class, 23 years after his untimely passing, the blowback of relief seemed to come from every corner of the hockey world.

It seemed everyone knew this was justice realized, even if it was more than 20 years overdue.

“He was quite a guy and a great innovator,” Flyers chairman Ed Snider said Friday of his long-ago head coach, the only one who ever won a championship for him. “He was an outstanding coach who had to put a group together and get the most out of them. It’s long overdue, and I’m just glad both of his sons will get a chance to enjoy this induction.”

It will happen Monday in Toronto, and to mark the occasion, a Snider-led caravan of some 15 former “Broad Street Bullies” will fly in for the ceremonies, most taking the trip together from Philadelphia.

How sad that Shero had left such a short time after those consecutive Cup championships in 1974-75. How inspiring that the mark he left on every one of them would never diminish.

“The one thing is Freddy had such love and respect for his athletes,” said hockey analyst Bill Clement, a center on the Flyers’ two Cup teams. “It was reciprocal. I really believe Freddy loved his players.”

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“Freddy knew how to prepare for anything. When you can beat a healthy Bobby Orr in six games — with a plan as to how you were going to attack and defeat Bobby Orr, then you can defeat anything.”

—Bill Clement

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Shero was born to be a coach. His best player, Bobby Clarke, was expected to not only follow a certain system, but help Shero teach it.

“We knew he was eccentric, but he was a teacher of hockey,” Clarke said. “He never gave anybody (stuff), never gave the team (stuff). If you made a mistake or did something that he thought was wrong, he’d correct it.”

And while loyalty to the coach led Clarke and others to lead by example, Shero had no problem acting the part of student, too. He was one of the first people from North America to not only study European hockey but go to the Soviet Union to engage the game as played behind the Iron Curtain.

As a result, the Flyers who were written off as a gangly group of goons that should be legislated more than any other team were actually one of the better organized and defensively disciplined teams in the league.

“He never came in and yelled,” Bill Barber said. “Honesty was in our play. There were nights when we lost and everyone had played well. And if that happened, we practiced harder.”

“He drilled it into us every day and made us that way,” Clarke added. “It’s the same fundamentals that went into today’s game, even though today’s game is a lot different. Get it outside your blue line. Don’t turn the puck over in the mid-zones. Don’t go offside. Don’t get three guys caught in the offensive zone. All simple things that are basically taught right from kids hockey.”

The Flyers were stingy. They had one of the best goaltenders in the world in Bernie Parent. They had offensive talents in guys like Clarke, Rick MacLeish and Reggie Leach. And yes, they had a team-wide belief in the art of sticking together, fists first.

“The only thing I can think of was that people on the (Hall selection) committee thought he was responsible for the mayhem that the Flyers caused in those days,” Clarke said. “He never was. You never see much anger in Freddy.

“He had that line, ‘Shortest route to the puck and arrive in ill humor.’ But I never heard him ever mention fighting or hitting people or stuff like that. Most of that we brought on ourselves as players.”

The Flyers reveled in the “Broad St. Bullies” nickname and were reviled around the league by fans, opposing players, coaches and officials alike. They represented the game of hockey as it was played on every back-plain pond in northern North America. But they were considered skilled in the art of dirty hockey by teams that found they couldn’t play with them.

Then the unthinkable happened. The Flyers beat the Boston Bruins, the odds-on favorite team of Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito and Wayne Cashman, for a Stanley Cup in 1974. Maybe there was something to that quirky coach and his foggy defense-first system after all.

“Freddy was a genius behind the bench,” Parent said. “If Freddy didn’t coach, he would have made a good psychologist. He made us believe in ourselves. He made us believe in the system. How he did that was by repetition.”

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“Freddy says to me, ‘You’re probably one of the better checkers on the team. I’m going to switch you from the right side to the left side to watch Guy Lafleur.’ The puck is shot in their zone and I’ve got him lined up and I ended up hitting the boards because he had sidestepped me, went past the other guys, split the defense and put the puck in the net. He said, ‘You’re supposed to watch Guy Lafleur.’ I said, ‘I was, Freddy. Wasn’t he great?’”

— Gary Dornhoefer

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They beat the Bruins. Then the next year they beat the Sabres. Around the NHL, however, the Flyers’ most signature victory, one in which they ironically played with more brutality than any league game, came against the Soviet Red Army team Jan. 11, 1976.

The Russians had flattened everybody else on their “goodwill” tour. This game would be different, both from a performance and physical standpoint. The hitting, some legal and mostly otherwise, literally moved the Soviets to parade off the ice.

They paraded right back after Snider threatened to not pay them. But Shero’s reward was a rare moment of self-satisfaction. The historic triumph was not going to be lost on him.

“To me, when they faced us, they were playing the best team in the league at that time of the year,” Barber said. “I thought we totally dominated and I was happy for Freddy because he was really pleased about it. He was tickled pink because we had handled the pressure well.”

After the 1977-78 season, he’d take his leave. It seemed his enthusiasm was sapped, but Shero’s loyalty as player and minor league coach to the Rangers made it easy for them to woo him.

He wanted to go there to be head coach, and the parting with the Flyers — who eventually received a first-round compensation pick from the Rangers (Ken Linseman) — was acrimonious.

But the bad feelings never festered. After Shero began fighting the cancer that would eventually take his life more than a decade later, he was welcomed back with open arms, honored as a member of the Flyers’ Hall of Fame.

It took nearly another quarter of a century for him to gain entrance into another Hall. It’s about time.